WAR TOYS IN FASHION

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21560, 24 January 1940, Page 10

WAR TOYS IN FASHION

SPITFIRES AND BLENHEIMS War toys are in fashion this Christmas, and the export trade from England has been greatly increased. Toy soldiers and guns which are now being shipped abroad in large quantities to the nurseries of the world are indirectly helping to pay for the imports necessary to equip Britain’s armies. Toy Spitfire fighters and Blenheim bombers are being made to exact scale, and a factory covering 30 acres is now starting production of model German Messerschmitts, Heinkels, and Dorniers. The head of this section, and ex-pilot, believes that the German planes will probably have a big sale, because children like to collect fleets of aircraft and they would be incomplete without an “enemy.” Models of Imperial Airways liners costing up to £5/5/- are used for commercial display purposes as well as for toys. The interiors are correctly furnished, even to a row of cocktail glasses for the bar; each glass is no bigger than the “e” in newspaper type, and they are produced, with other accessories, in electrically-driven power injection presses costing from £l5OO to £2500. Latest addition to the Naval vessels will be the new “J,” “K,” and “L” class destroyers. -Although only a few inches long, these destroyers will have the proper single raked funnel and twin screws driven by a geareddown clockwork engine; they will mount six 4.7 in guns, ten 21 in torpedo tubes in groups of five, multiple machine-guns, and a pom-pom on its platform amidships. Moreover, they will be made to scale with the “Tribal” class destroyers and all the other toy warships. Early in the New Year the new types of dolls will be ready for export. They are as topical as the military toys, for they will be dressed in uniforms of the fighting and Home Defence Services. Land Army girl, Tommies in battle dress, and “twin” dolls, permanently arm-in-arm. such as a sailor with a girl of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, are among the popular new “fashions.”